“Present Tense: Fiction for Our Time” WR151
How do contemporary writers help us make sense of a world in crisis? In this course, we explore how fiction written in the last decade responds to the urgent challenges of our time—from pandemics and climate change to racial injustice, economic disparity, and rising authoritarianism.
Through novels and short stories by authors like Mohsin Hamid, Ling Ma, Colson Whitehead, and Jenny Offill, students examine how literature reflects, resists, and reimagines the conditions of our present. Our work in the classroom is both critical and creative: students develop their analytical writing through discussion and collaborative exercises, while also experimenting with new forms of expression—including a final project in the form of a podcast. This course invites students to read and write in ways that are attentive, imaginative, and engaged with the world around them.
“Under Construction: Infrastructure and Culture” WR150
Infrastructure shapes the way we live—often in ways we barely notice. From highways and power grids to sewer systems and broadband networks, these vast, interconnected systems quietly organize our daily lives. But behind the scenes, infrastructure raises urgent questions: Who gets access? Who is excluded? Who builds and maintains these systems—and at what cost?
This course invites students to explore infrastructure not just as engineering, but as culture—as a lens for examining power, inequality, and the invisible structures that sustain modern life. Through critical and creative engagement, students investigate how infrastructure intersects with issues of politics, race, environment, and economics. Along the way, they build research and writing skills through a major scholarly project, as well as public-facing work that reimagines how we communicate knowledge to broader audiences.
“Reconsidering Infrastructure Through the Arts” WR120
Infrastructure is everywhere—but often unnoticed. This course asks what happens when artists make the invisible visible: when writers, filmmakers, and designers turn their attention to the systems that sustain everyday life. Roads, power grids, water systems, and broadband networks shape how we move, connect, and survive—but who has access to them, and who gets left out?
In this first-year writing seminar, students explore how literature, film, and public art engage with infrastructure as both subject and metaphor. We examine works by artists and writers like Colson Whitehead, Karen Tei Yamashita, Bong Joon-ho, and Mohsin Hamid to consider how art can expose inequalities, reimagine public systems, and bring hidden structures into view. Along the way, students sharpen their writing through sustained inquiry, research, and revision—learning how to engage audiences, use sources effectively, and write with purpose across genres.
“Introduction to Fiction: A Global Perspective” EN 141
This course explores how fiction helps us understand the complex relationship between identity and place. Through a global lens, we examine how literary characters are shaped by the histories, politics, and cultures of their environments—and how settings themselves are never just backdrops, but dynamic forces that influence who we are and how we live.
We read fiction that spans continents and centuries, from the streets of Dublin to postcolonial landscapes in the Global South. Pairing canonical modernists like Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and William Faulkner with writers such as Tayeb Salih, V.S. Naipaul, and Juan Rulfo, we investigate how lives are formed—and transformed—through intersections of race, gender, class, and geography. Students engage with these texts through a comparative, transnational framework that asks how storytelling reflects and responds to a rapidly globalizing world.
“Literature for the Long Emergency” EN 120
Disasters don’t come out of nowhere—they emerge from long histories of environmental degradation, economic inequality, and political neglect. This course examines how literature helps us understand crisis not as a single event, but as an ongoing condition that shapes lives, landscapes, and communities.
We read fiction that responds to ecological collapse, forced migration, and social upheaval—stories that explore what happens when the systems we rely on begin to fail. Through writers like William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, Cormac McCarthy, Emily St. John Mandel, and Mohsin Hamid, we ask: What causes catastrophe? Who bears the brunt? What new forms of belonging and resistance emerge in its wake?
Spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, the course challenges students to think critically about the boundaries between normalcy and emergency—and how literature reveals the political stakes of that distinction.
“Who Tells Your Story: Historical Narrative and Popular Culture in Hamilton, An American Musical” WR150, Spring 2018
This course explores how history is told—and retold—through popular culture. Focusing on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, we examine how the musical adapts, transforms, and mythologizes U.S. history through the lenses of race, gender, class, and genre.
Through close readings of the musical, primary historical documents, and selections from Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, students investigate how Hamilton blends hip-hop, musical theater, and national mythmaking. We consider what stories are emphasized or erased, how public memory is constructed, and what’s at stake when history becomes entertainment.
“The Resistance Mix-Tape: Music and Politics” WR100
This course explores how music functions as a form of political expression and cultural resistance. From the pro-union folk anthems of Woody Guthrie to the powerful protest lyrics of Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar, we examine how artists across genres and eras have used music to challenge injustice, give voice to marginalized communities, and reflect the social movements of their time.
Each week, we focus on a different musical genre—folk, punk, hip-hop, and more—analyzing how sound, lyrics, and visual elements intersect with race, gender, class, and historical context. Students sharpen their critical reading, listening, and writing skills through close analysis of these multimodal texts and the cultural conversations they provoke.